[fptex] new binaries

[Bernd Raichle]

On Thursday, 28 February 2002 09:30:51 +0100,
Hans Hagen <pragma@wxs.nl> writes:
 > At 06:08 PM 2/27/2002 +0100, Fabrice Popineau wrote:
[...]
 > >
 > >Also : what do people think about kpathsea transparently being
 > >able to open .gz files ?

IMHO nice to have.  In my (very) old TeX system running on VAX/BSD4.2
resp. Sun 3/60/SunOS I had this features in TeX and dvips using the
old compress/uncompress execs.  It was very useful for EPS files
because disk space was very limited and expensive.


 > could be an interesting option (accessing zip archives would also be 
 > interesting, but then we need something blabla.zip//filename or so; is 
 > opening zip files part of the zip libaries?)

Mmmh, if ZIP files are integrated it is best done in a more
transparent way.  A filename like ``blabla.zip//filename'' assumes
that (a) there is a ZIP file and (b) that you cannot unpack the files
in the ZIP and use the unpacked files anymore.

Thus it is better to use ``balbla/filename'' in your TeX document as
usually and integrate a more or less intelligent logic in kpathsea
which uses an existing ZIP file with the name of a directory part if
there is no such directory.  A given filename ``a/b/c/d/e'' will then
result in searches for file `e' in `a/b/c/d.zip', for file `d/e' in
`a/b/c.zip', for file `c/d/e' in `a/b.zip', or file `b/c/d/e' in
`a.zip', if there is no such directory but a zip archive ...


-bernd